Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that [ak]moves on the earth.” 29 Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; 30 and to every animal of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. 31 And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Now from what I gather in the verses above, man, like the animals, are to be vegetarians, sire progeny, and be what they are. More specifically, God made man and woman in His own image, which is the typical Christian understanding of humanity.
But I wonder, how is God's image in man alone and not in the earth and cosmos He created? It feels like an unnatural distinction to simply conclude God's image can only be found in mankind.
"Well," says the teacher, "And why not? We have been given morality, language, and culture!" This makes us superior to all other created things. It is our natural right to rule over the heavens and the earth!"
And again I wonder, "If man is so high on the scale of morality then why have so many cruel, murderous, and hellish, things been done in God's image? Is God cruel, murderous, and hellish in who He is?" It seems that if the earth becomes any more full of us it will perish under our weight. Is God the kind of God who is destructive and known as the "Destroyer of All Things?" I thought God was good, and kind, and loving. But in man's image God seems to be just the opposite.
And what about this language thing? Can man sing like the songbird in the morning? Can he whisper like the wind through the early morning boughs of spring? Can he call his children together as the ptarmigan her brood on the mountain top? Where is man's speech in the rainstorm, the fire, the deeps of the ocean, or the smallest mews of the kitten under the warmth of its mother? Are these not God's image too?
And finally, man is said to have the ability of culture... but in my experience it has been because of cultural differences we dislike each other, ostracize and discriminate against one another, even go to war with each other under the banners of personal rights, liberties, and holy destruction... all in the name of God though in all cases its in the name of ourselves claiming divine power in the face of human greed, sin and evil.
No sooner had I thought this things another speaks up in class blaming sin and evil on all things - that God's imago in man is marred by sin, distorted by evil, unmirroring the Divine One Himself!
"My, my," I thought, "Here's comes the old Christian canard of blaming sin for the want of God's image become an ugly thing in the transfer." Christianity makes convenient excuses for its theologies. This one runs to the top of the list for many. It gives every ready reason for every ugly thing done by humanity to one another and to this earth we were to caretake.
And so, I thought, "If God's image in man of morality, language, and culture is the highest achievable image of God in creation, then we're all screwed. God must admit a catastrophic FAIL in His divine modus operandi, back up, reset the clock (the Christian teaching of Tribulation, Armageddon, and fiery end of the earth), start over (a new heavens and earth), and learn from his mistake that love and freewill just don't go together. The equation was prejudiced to failure from the start."
All questions of the future aside, I don't think God made a mistake. It is our failure to hear God so one-sidely in Genesis as to think that man alone was created in God's image and none other. Tell me of one artist who paints, sculpts, welds, or builds, who doesn't put their whole self into a project? If it comes from the hand of the artist, then it comes all without division of character.
I don't think of God as dipolar, bipolar, or bearing a personality disorder of some kind. But I do think of man as always hearing things in a selfish, prideful, haughty way. To only think in Genesis that man alone bears God image is to put to fine a touch on the brush of the Master. God's painting of the cosmos does include His imago dei... ALL of it. From the least quark to the largest star. From the smallest cell to the largest biological organism. Man is not alone in God's image. God's image is everywhere we look.
So let us redefine the Imago Dei once and for all from a process Christian outlook rather than by the tired Christian outlook of morality, speech, and culture. Let us see God's image in terms of:
- creativity
- novelty
- relationship and relationality
- connectivity to all and all back to its parts
- feelings of connection to one and all
- feelings of relationship and relationality
- the ability to respond, react, readjust to external stimuli
- the ability to affect and be affected by environment
- to change, to continue forward, to remember the past
In all these attitudes one may find the qualities of creation throughout the qualities of God. A God who is impassable in character but passable in relationship to creation. A God who is deemed Sovereign of the universe but in the ways of partnering with His creation towards divine outcome rather than coercive determination and breaking His own "rules" as set by classical thinking.
And less we have missed the obvious, the limitation of Christian philosophy has always been it's human centric view of the world rather than its process-centered thought of seeing creation - of which we are a part - in its fullness together granting us no greater distinction than any of its parts. We all, as a creative organism, are part of God's imago dei with none of its parts any greater or less greater than the rest of its parts, stamped by God's image.
And like the elephant which does not speak on podcasts but just is in its beingness to what it is in relation to its environment, I don't think man has yet to learn how to be like the elephant. To be. To be content in who we are. To live in relation to nature in a way that is restorative, natural, and unharming.
As evolutionary "superior" creatures I suspect our pride and me-centeredness only sees elephants and trees, colonies of ants and pods of whales, as aspects of isolated normalcies rather than as integral necessities to one another living in balance with the earth's entropy.
R.E. Slater
September 23, 2021
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- African elephant (Loxodonta Africana)
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There are many physical differences between African and Asian elephants (see infographic).
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